Beast

Where do I even start.

Nelson also probably had the same question when he had to make this movie. Without finding much answers, he stuck with the usual formula that everyone thinks vijay’s fans enjoy for some reason? Action-Sentiment-Comedy-Romance. He ticked all these boxes in the first 10 mins of the movie, starting with Vijay helping a child out and then accidentally killing it, single handedly defeating all of the terrorists in a foreign territory, sexist and inappropriate jokes about women, psychiatry and PTSD, and then followed by the tomboy girl acting cool with the hero and hero wanting to hold the girl’s iduppu. The movie had everything and every single thing was made in the worst possible way.

I understand movies like Beast are made purely to collect the crores of rupees during the initial 5 days after release but don’t the 100s of talented people who work in movies like this have even an iota of guilt that they’re producing such garbage like this? How did this get through so many levels of quality check up until its release? How did selvaraghavan calling vijay “Indian James Bond” get a go ahead? How is this character even remotely related to james bond? But really have to appreciate both nelson and vijay to re-use his punch dialogue from pokkiri even though it has been heavily trolled ever since its release. That too with the exact same deadpan expression. Takes real guts.

The writing is so forgettable that I had to skim through the movie again in netflix while writing even though I just finished it 30 mins before I started writing. To let us know that the minister is the bad guy, they have him actually call the terrorist group and reiterate his goals of this mission at the very beginning of the movie. This minister is acting like he wants to defeat the terrorists but keeps slipping up which makes the people around him doubt that he’s acting. And apparently it’s impossible to have 2 woman in a movie without them fighting over a guy? There is an actual scene where they just angrily stare at each other. Apparently someone in the middle of the movie said the sentiment quotient is lacking so they made one of the terrorists yearn for his dying son and kill him off by the meaner (?) terrorist later in the movie. How did he even get this job in the first place?

The incoherence in the screenplay was super contagious that its showing up in my writing as well.

It felt as if Anirudh composed a bunch of mass sound bits and handed it over that they just stitched it with the scenes back to back. Characters having a singular expression is one of Nelson’s biggest traits and even that did not work here. The signature deadpan dialogue delivery of Vijay was just plain annoying in every single scene, and this feeling was unrelated of my opinion about Vijay. The lighting and cinematography stood out in some of the action sequences but also got tiring after the 15th fight scene or something. Everything was just plain bad.

Vijay tried to warn us in the trailer itself saying that inime than bayangarama irukkum but we’re the ones who didn’t listen. I know there are mixed feelings about watching a movie with expectations but I actually expected Beast to be decent, even though all good directors making movies with larger than life heroes have proved me wrong in the past. I don’t know if watching this in the theater would have given me a different experience but at least I didn’t lose 120 rubees.